Sol and Lune

by Waxworks

The Moon and the Sun

Princess Luna came south with the Pillars. They traveled down to the once-lush fields of Equestria, where crops were grown in abundance and there was much to see and feel. Now, there was naught but desert.

Sand choked the fields, and dead plants lay everywhere, half-hidden in the sand. There were houses, skeletons, and trees dying everywhere they looked, and the sun’s light, harsh, red, and angry, baked down on them. Luna stood, looking pleased.

“So this is what our sister has allowed to happen? We shall fix it. Fear not, my little ponies.”

She placed a helmet on her head. Where she had gotten it, Starswirl didn’t know, but it made her look a little sinister, in his opinion. Her eyes gleamed green, and he wondered if they always had been that color. He tried to remember, but he was tired, his mind frazzled. He had been working non-stop to save the ponies from this terrible weather and come up short. He needed somepony else’s help, and the princess of the night seemed a good candidate. He watched as she stepped out onto the desert sands, head held high.

He wasn’t sure how to describe what happened next. The baking midday sun had been there one moment, but then the next, Luna had hovered up into the air above the terrible sands. Her wings opened and her mane flared in… darkness? She glowed, then. Both dark and light at the same time. It was a harsh glow at first, which slowly dimmed to a faded, muted light, not unlike that of the moon. The temperature dropped, and when she landed, she was carrying with her a large chunk of stone. She passed it to Starswirl, smiling coyly.

“Enjoy it, Starswirl. Our gift to thee.”

He took it, at first in his magic, but he dropped it immediately after his aura touched it. Luna caught it in hers again, clucking her tongue.

“Be careful, Starswirl. I’m sure you can feel it.”

He could. It was powerful. More powerful than he could have imagined. It was filled with sun energy. So much so that his magic wavered near it. The other Pillars took a step backward, warily eyeing the rock, Starswirl, and Princess Luna.

Tentatively, he grasped it again.

Power flooded into him. His beard prickled from the sheer strength of it, and the world grew brighter. His field of view seemed to stretch, and his horn sparked. Luna’s helmet shone bright, and he could see through her with this power in his grasp. He saw Princess Luna herself, shrunken and cowering beneath something else. Something connected to the helmet, and he realized what it was made of then. The mare looking at him from within Luna was all shadows and sharp teeth. Dark eyes and sinister smiles. Terrible strength and simultaneous beauty. He idly wondered how long Luna had been suffering.

From the stone came more power, filling him until he thought he would burst, but with it also came another entity. A dark entity, one that grasped at him and his magic. It lashed out at him with impossible strength, but Starswirl had used the sun’s power for his own gains for too long. With the new power given to him he took the creature and idly tossed it aside, banishing it to darkness… somewhere. In his giddy delight at the power and his confusion at princess Luna’s state, he didn’t know where, but it was gone. The power was clean. The power was his.

“Thank you, Princess. I will be careful,” he finally said. She looked at him, clearly aware of what he had done, but her smile never faltered.

“Full glad we are. We do not believe we can do anything more for this place. It has been under the yoke of the sun for too long. If it will recover, it will do so on its own. We are heading home.” Without waiting for a reply, Luna cast a teleportation spell and disappeared. Somnambula gasped. Rockhoof cleared his throat.

“Guess we’ll be heading off too,” Rockhoof said.

“Yes, there’s a lot to do now that ponies are safe here again. I’ll look for anypony that needs food, shelter, or water,” Meadowbrook said. There was muttered agreement from the others, and they all went their separate ways. Starswirl was unsure if they were scared of if they just didn’t want to talk about what had happened. Had they seen what he had seen? He didn’t think so, but he had bigger problems than just deserts. Luna was in trouble, and he had given her information to use against Celestia. He teleported back to the castle of the two sisters himself and descended into his laboratory with his new moon rock. There was research to be done.

Confirming his suspicions, Starswirl found that the stone had been a prison for some beast. He had carelessly thrown it away, and he was worried what that might mean, but in addition, he found that the amount of sunlight Luna had taken from the sun might mean there was a greater problem. It was a powerful artifact, but she had cooled the sun completely. Or at least, taken the light it was sending and injured it. After a day of study, he went in search of Celestia. He needed to talk to her.

Celestia was ill.

She lay on her bed, her mane and tail changed to the normal solid colors and hairs of a regular pony. Her wings were shedding feathers and her face was pallid. She breathed normally, but she was told that her moments of lucidity had been sparse. She was not feeling well, that was clear. He was let inside her room on the condition that he leave her be, but he could not afford to be kind at the moment. Something was happening. He forced the servants out of the room with his magic and shut the door. He leaned in close and told her what had happened.

“I am sorry, Princess. Your sun was killing southern Equestria. Deserts and badlands have grown out of what was once lush and green. I enlisted Luna’s help in restoring them and she stole light from the sun.” He looked away from her a moment when her eyes shifted to his. He couldn’t look her in the eye. “I fear something—that shifting shape I saw on the moon—has taken your sister away and put itself in her place. I know not what it might be, but I fear it comes from the sun. If there is anything you can tell me, please, I must know!”

Celestia breathed in slowly. Her exhalation brought with it her words and he listened carefully. “Starswirl, the sun has never been kind to me. I fight it each morning for the power it wants, and I combat it each night as I force it below. Surely you felt some of that when you took part in the ritual?”

Starswirl shook his head. Though he felt it stealing—or trying to steal—his magic during the ritual, he had never needed to “fight” it, like she said. It wasn’t what he would call a fight, anyway. More like tucking in an unruly foal.

“The sun is a creature,” she said. “A magical creature, made of light and aether, not unlike a timberwolf or cragadile, made of sticks and mud. I… trade with this creature, and our magic sustains each other. In taking that small sample for you, I enraged the beast, and I vowed I would do no more. But you…” she looked at him and blinked slowly. “It tells me that you have been consuming it. Devouring it piece by little piece, and it is angry. It has been attacking me and Equestria little by little, and I am at the end of what I can do to protect my little ponies. If Luna has a way to stop it, let her. For Equestria.”

Starswirl didn’t know what to say. Celestia’s claim that the sun was alive was ridiculous. Inconceivable. Mad even! It had no face, no arms, no legs, and it didn’t even have anything it lived on. That it was responsible for life on Equestria was ridiculous! Such a thing couldn’t happen. He had touched the sun with his magic. That… didn’t feel like a creature.

Not a creature he was familiar with, at least.

But the sun wasn’t following the usual rules creatures obeyed, did it? Like that movement on the moon. What was that, then? Was it something of the sun, or something of the moon? Was the moon a creature as well? He needed to talk to Luna.

He searched the castle, but he could find no sign of her. Nopony had claimed to have seen her recently, and though he tried well past the rising of the moon, he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t even where she usually stood to raise the moon. He eventually had to give up and returned to his laboratory. Inside, he brought out the rock she had given him, pulsing with power and light. He placed it on the table and looked at it with a critical eye. It stared back, unblinking. Unflinching.

A rock.

He reached out and touched it with his magic. Like before, he could feel the power inside it. Contained. It was pulsing, throbbing on his desk with magic energy. Potential, just waiting to be unleashed, veins of magic straining against the prison of stone around it.

…not unlike a magical heartbeat.

He shook his head to clear such a thought from his mind and studied it more intensely. He needed to understand it to understand what was wrong with Celestia. Was there a life in there? Was the magic part of a creature he was unaware of? Was him consuming it why he no longer felt the need to sleep? To eat? To do anything? Was he living off the life energy of a beast that he did not know was a beast? Was it lashing out against him?

So many questions that he couldn’t answer, until he heard a voice in his ear.

“Yes. To all thine questions,” Luna said.

Starswirl jumped, almost dropping the rock off the desk. Luna caught it and gently lay it back on top.

“Be careful, Starswirl. What thee possesseth is a weapon more than it is anything else. We are sure thou hast noticed it? In thy visit to our dear sister, we are sure she mentioned it?” She smiled a wicked smile. “We are the moon, and our sister is the sun. We are opposing forces locked in terrible battle. We consume her as she attempts to destroy us. You, here on Equestria, pass unnoticed, save for thy feedings daily. She useth thee, and we useth her, though she knows it not.”

“She? You mean Celestia?”

Luna looked at Starswirl. Her eyes were green, catlike slits. She still wore that helmet from before, and her coat was darker than ever. Her mane and tail were black, speckled with few stars. Darkness upon darkness, she was. Her eyes narrowed. “We refer to our sibling. The sun.”

Starswirl took a step back. Her answer told him nothing, but it implied too much. Worrying amounts of information were present, though he missed enough pieces to put it together. “So, Celestia?”

Luna followed him, stepping forward as he stepped back. She smiled, and he saw her teeth had become fangs. Not ponylike at all. His eyes widened. “You’re… not Luna.”

“We are Luna. We are us. We have always been us. The moon, versus the sun.”

The creature on the moon! The moving being he had seen through his telescope, this was it, contained within Luna, the same way the moon contained the sun’s light. But was the creature possessing her part of the sun birthed on the moon, or was it the moon itself?

Starswirl looked into those dark eyes and saw himself, reflected, disappearing into her with every slow step she took toward him. He wanted to cry out, but to whom could he turn for help? He was one of the pillars of Equestria. A powerful wizard. The unicorn among unicorns. He was the bar by which others were measured. If he needed help, what could he do?

“Thou seemest fearful of us. We are not thy enemy, Starswirl. We are merely here to watch as the sun perisheth. We shall take from her the light and protect Equestria from her terrible gaze. None shall fear the burning power of the sun whilst we rule, as is our right.”

“Nothing will grow.”

“Everything shall grow. We can protect everypony from it as we have been doing so for these many years. It is only by the foolish energy of the unicorns that the sun even hath power. Thou takest from it, as I do. Thou knoweth the truth, and thee canst make thine own decisions. Stand not in our way, Starswirl. We bringeth darkness soon.” She disappeared in a dark cloud of smoke, and Starswirl was alone again. When he had collected his thoughts, he picked up the moon rock once again and teleported away. He needed the pillars.

He found the rest of them in the southern desert where he had left them. They were trying to get the ponies there back on their hooves and save as many lives as they could. There was no life to be had there, unfortunately. The sand had choked out everypony, filling houses, buildings, gardens and fields, everything was gone. Even trying to cool the sun was having no effect on the sand the land had become.

“It’s getting worse,” Meadowbrook said.

“What is?” Starswirl asked.

“The heat.”

“But Princess Luna…”

She shook her head. “The heat’s coming back. The sun’s getting warmer again. Surely you noticed it when you arrived?”

Starswirl hadn’t. To him it had felt fine. He wasn’t overheating even with his long robes and prodigious beard. He felt… balmy, even. “I must admit I didn’t notice.” He looked at the others. Every one of them was sweating save for Somnambula, who was used to such heat. “How hot is it?” he asked.

Rockhoof shook his head. “It’s terrible, and it’s climbing constantly. We’ve received messenger birds from all over Equestria, and the heat is getting worse. The south is taking the brunt of it, but if it continues, there’s not telling how bad it will get.”

Starswirl stroked his beard. He wasn’t feeling any of it himself, but he had to assume that was because of his consumption of the sun’s energy. If Luna was any indication, then it was aware of what it was doing. But if that were the case, how did one communicate with the sun? By lifting it?”

“I must try something. I think I know what is wrong. You must continue what we all started, even if I do not return.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m going to talk to the sun.” He stood and teleported away, not waiting for a response. It wasn’t going to make any more sense than that.

In his laboratory, Starswirl collected the jars of sunlight he had amassed over the years of his research. He collected every moon rock he had, every different type of sunlight, and carried them all to the upper parts of the castle of the sisters. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was high. There would be no better time.

“Hello, Sun,” he said. He couldn’t be sure, but he felt like the temperature rose a degree or two. He didn’t want to imagine what that might mean. He placed the jars and rocks in a circle around him, then sat down in the center. “We have a lot to discuss.”

He looked up at the sun and sighed, then prepared the familiar old spell he used to cast with the unicorns of the newly-founded Equestria. His horn glowed, and he reached up and out toward the sun. He grasped ahold of it with his magic, a tentative grip, and heard a cry from somewhere in the castle.

His spell dropped.

Celestia’s screams died away, and he tried again, touching the sun gingerly with his magic. He heard nothing, and just had to pray that the princess would be alright. She was weakened, but that was his own fault. He could only pray that this would help.

When he grabbed hold of the sun, he heard—or rather felt—a presence in his mind. It was furious, angry, and lashed out at him. It, unlike Celestia, was not in a weaker sort of state. It was powerful, terribly powerful, and it hated him for what he had done. He felt its rage and anger at him for taking away its magic, and even more it hated him for consorting with the creature on the moon. Starswirl felt the temperature around him rise another few degrees. He felt nothing, but he could visibly see the plants in the forest around him wilt. A bird fell from the sky.

He felt more than heard a command, and when it came he implicitly understood. He opened one of the jars in front of him, and held it up above his head. The light within disappeared, and the presence in his mind faltered in its rage. Starswirl felt a glimmer of hope.

Again and again he returned his jars of light to the orb in the sky above him. Each time he turned the light he collected over to it, he felt cooler, and calmer. The sun was taking back what belonged to it, and Equestria was doing better. Starswirl smiled.

But… he didn’t want to give it all back. The moon’s rocks were his, and he enjoyed their power. The endless wellspring of magic with which he could perform miracles of all kinds far beyond the limits of his own magic. How aware was the sun? How clever was it? How intelligent?

After the last jar was turned over to it, he found out.

The final jar sat empty next to him. The deep colors of the sunset swirled in the sky above him, then raced back to their source. They mixed into the overwhelming rays of sunlight coming down from above, and then were gone. He looked down at the moon rocks and waited, holding his grip on the sun. He wanted to know if it was aware of everything he had taken. There was calm for a short time, then a beam of light shot down from the sun directly onto him. He felt the air around him heat up, wavering before his eyes from the temperature.

“Alright! Alright! I understand!” Starswirl held up one of the moon rocks and the he watched in morbid fascination as it became superheated. He winced, protecting himself with a small shield as the rock melted. It was gone in an instant, vaporized into nothing as the sun stole back the magic the moon had taken.

He lifted up the next, and the next, and they disappeared as well. Then he held up the largest. There was a loud CRACK as it exploded in the air, releasing a dark, swirling cloud. The cloud, however, did not travel up to the sun. The shadow grew eyes just for a moment, hissing in pain at the powerful sunlight bathing it. Starswirl wanted to capture it, but it was all he could do to protect himself from the sunlight. If it was another one of those creatures from the moon he could have learned more to find out what happened to Luna, but his own hubris was catching up to him. He could only watch helplessly as the shadowy beast disappeared away from the sun, heading to the east in the direction of Hollow Shades.

When all the rocks were gone, Starswirl looked up helplessly at the sun. The heat was still present, and still unbearable. It was pounding down on him, demanding more. He tried to let go, unable to give it anything else, but it demanded more of him. A greedy, terrible creature, exactly as Luna had said. It wanted more, and if he couldn’t escape or stop it, it was going to take more.

He could feel his magic slipping out of him. He heard wordless speech in his head and although he couldn’t understand it, he knew it was trying to take back what he had already used. He felt himself weaken, his legs giving way beneath him as it tried to take his magic. He slumped over, panting and sweating from the immense heat.

Then… shade.

A figure landed in front of him. The afterimages from looking at the sun were blinding him, but he saw wings, he saw a horn, and he saw a glowing mane and tail. He felt the grip on his horn loosen and then he blacked out.

When he awoke, it was night, and the cool light of the moon was shining down on him. He felt a hoof on his forehead, and a cool cloth. He winced at the sting of it touching his skin, and realized he must be sunburned.

“Shhhh, Starswirl. Thou hast been a fool, but thy heart was in the right place. Thou shouldst not have faced the sun so directly.”

“Princess Luna?”

“Tis the moon, yes. The returning of our gifts to the sun hast calmed her fury, but though she acts so regal and important, she is fierce and dangerous. Thou wouldst do well not to cross her so soon.”

“And… Equestria?”

“Thou hast helped us a great deal. Releasing one of our brothers. We know not where he hast gone.”

“Brothers? Sisters?” Starswirl was confused. His head hurt, and his body stung.

“Shhh, rest. Thou will discover more thyself, we are sure.” He felt the hoof disappear, though the cool cloth stayed. He blinked, but saw nothing save darkness moving away, then he slept again.

He drifted in and out of consciousness for a few days. Mage Meadowbrook and Somnambula came to visit him, but strangely, Celestia never did. When he finally got well enough to walk once more, he went to visit her to question her about the sun.

“Good day, Princess Celestia. I would speak with you.”

“Approach, Starswirl.” Her demeanor was cool, and her eyes hard. He came closer. “What wouldst thou ask of the sun?” Her eyes blazed a fiery orange. Starswirl bowed and retreated.

“Nothing, Princess. All my answers have come in your presence,” he said. She watched him go, and when the doors closed he breathed a heavy sigh. There was more to the sun and the moon than he knew, and he did not know if he would live to keep their secrets safe.

He would try.

He would try.

The End.

Comments

[Waxworks]

9032912
I wasn't planning on a sequel. The events take place before Luna became Nightmare Moon as a sort of lead-up to that. If you've watched the show, that's what happened to Luna and the Pillars. The Pillars chase the shadow beast, which is what Starswirl unleashed, and Nightmare Moon gets banished. It was just supposed to be a scary take on the "why".